Tagged — Jamie Lyons
I've been thinking about France the way you think about a lover who destroyed you but goddamn if you don't still want another round. It's not the museums or the fucking architecture, though sure, fine, whatever, it's this nagging sense that they figured something out the rest of us are still fumbling with like teenagers trying to unhook a bra in the dark.
The French have this relationship with pleasure that's almost obscene in its lack of apology. They'll spend three hours over lunch not because they're lazy but because they understand that time itself is the luxury, not the watch you're wearing while you waste it. Meanwhile, we're all speed running existence, optimizing our joy into thirty-minute increments between Zoom calls, wondering why nothing tastes like anything anymore.
And the language. Christ, the language. It sounds like someone's trying to seduce a philosophy textbook. Every conversation is this weird performance art piece where the subtext matters more than the text, where you can start an argument that lasts six hours over whether a film was "good" or merely "interesting," and somehow by the end you're both drunk and best friends and you still don't know what the hell you were really fighting about.
But France is built on this foundation of profound, almost beautiful arrogance. They look at the rest of the world doing its anxious little dance, trying to be liked, trying to be relevant, posting and performing and please validate me, and they just... don't. They've decided what matters and they don't particularly care if you agree. There's something both infuriating and weirdly admirable about that kind of commitment to your own mythology.
The whole country feels like it's in on some cosmic joke that they're not going to explain to you. You can spend a lifetime there and still feel like you're missing the punchline. Maybe that's the point. Maybe the refusal to make things easy, to sand down the edges for tourist consumption, to translate the untranslatable, maybe that's the whole game.
France doesn't want to be understood. It wants to be experienced, argued with, maybe hated a little, definitely desired. It's the place that reminds you that civilization doesn't have to be efficient or particularly nice to be worth the trouble.
FalseArt 2022
What went down 50 years ago at the Château de Ferrières on December 12, 1972 wasn’t just some party. It was the kind of decadent, surreal fever dream that makes you question whether you’ve been living wrong your entire life or whether these people had simply lost the plot so completely that they’d achieved some […]
Read
Wanderlust 2010
Here it is, mid fucking day in Avignon and the sun’s a blowtorch turned on this stone plaza, 100 plus degrees of Mediterranean fury, and there’s this ghost, this white painted wraith doing Butoh like he’s negotiating with death itself, and I’m the only sonofabitch here to see it. But here’s the thing that breaks […]
ReadAbsolute Solipsism 2006
This photograph doesn’t lie because it can’t. I’m alone with the weight of being the only consciousness that matters, if consciousness matters at all, drinking wine where Romans probably did the same stupid gorgeous thing. This is vineyard solipsism at it’s finest… the afternoon bleeds gold and I’m stealing it, one sip at a time, […]
Read
Individualism 2005
Site Specific Art at The Avignon Theatre Festival (Festival d’Avignon). I’m standing in some medieval stone square and the light’s doing that thing where it’s too golden to be real, and there’s a woman in white doing something with her body that shouldn’t be possible, and you think maybe you’ve finally lost it. Maybe that […]
Read
Individualism 2005
We’d just stumbled out of Cremaster, brains still melting from Matthew Barney’s latex and petroleum jelly fever dream, trying to articulate what the fuck we’d just witnessed, all that obsessive bodily mythology, those baroque genital landscapes, when the alley starts filling with them. White painted bodies coming at us like a slow motion avalanche of […]
Read
FalseArt 2005
July in Avignon, watching Belgian weirdo Jan Fabre, the festival’s designated madman-in-residence, make his performers roll around in their own sweat while reciting what I can only assume was poetry, though my French was drowning after the third pastis. The whole goddamn city had become one sprawling theatrical acid trip, and I was here for […]
Read